Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

There was something about Rosemary Gaynor’s death that was making a bell go off, ever so faintly, in the back of her head.

Given Wanda’s photographic memory for these things, she wondered why it wasn’t coming up right away. She could usually close her eyes and call up bludgeonings and gunshot wounds as though they were snapshots from a family album.

What had happened to Rosemary Gaynor reminded her not of something she had seen, but of something she had heard about.

Something three or four years ago.

Another murder.

Three years ago, right around this time, she’d taken a two-month leave of absence. Her sister Gilda, in Duluth, had been dying, and Wanda had gone up there to look after her in those final weeks. It had been a sad time, but also profoundly meaningful. It became one of the most important periods in her life. Wanda still made calls back to Promise Falls, checking in, catching up on what was going on. Gilda had jokingly accused her at one point of being more interested in the fully dead than the aspiring.

Wanda opened another program. Photo files from other cases, arranged by date. She went back to the beginning of her leave, opening one file after another.

A five-year-old girl run over by a car.

A forty-eight-year-old roofer who tripped off the top of a church he was reshingling.

A nineteen-year-old Thackeray student from Burlington, Vermont, who’d brought his father’s Porsche 911 to school for a week, lost control of it, and crashed it into a hundred-year-old oak at eighty miles per hour.

A twenty-two-year-old woman who—

Hang on...

Wanda clicked on the file.

Opened up the photos.

Took a sip of her coffee as she studied the images.

“Oh, boy,” she said.

Once Agnes Pickens was finished talking to her nephew, she went up the stairs to her second-floor home office and closed the door. She sat down at her desk, fired up her computer, opened Word, and selected the letter format.

She wanted the margins just right. What she had to write was short, so she didn’t want the letter to start too high on the page, which would leave acres of white space at the bottom. It would look unbalanced.

So she wrote what she had to say, then selected “print preview” to make sure it looked presentable. It didn’t. She had pushed the message too far down on the page. She deleted a few indents above the text, then looked at the preview again, and was happy with how it looked.

She hit “print.”

The letter came out, and she read it one more time, looking for typos. That would be so embarrassing, to have a typographical error or a spelling mistake in something of this nature.

Agnes had dated it at the top, then written below:

I hereby resign my position as administrator and general manager of the Promise Falls General Hospital, effective immediately.

She had considered, briefly, expanding on it. Perhaps a word about regret. Maybe a line or two about her lifelong commitment to the Promise Falls community and public health. An apology about failing to live up to the high standards she had set for herself. But in the end, a simple, unembellished resignation seemed the way to go.

She signed the letter, folded it, and slipped it into an envelope on which she wrote, To the Promise Falls General Hospital Board.

She left it on the keyboard, then went in search of her husband, Gill. Agnes had thought he was upstairs, perhaps in their bedroom, but she did not find him there. She located him in the basement, standing next to the pool table, holding a cue in hand vertically, the end touching the floor. The balls were racked, but Gill just stood there, staring vacantly across the table.

“Gill,” she said.

He turned. “Yes, Agnes.”

“I have to go out.”

“Have you heard from Natalie?”

“Not since she arrived at the station.” She hesitated. “But everything’s going to be okay.”

Gill set the pool cue on the table. “But if you haven’t heard from Natalie—”

“They’re going to drop the charges against Marla. Before the day is over, I’d guess.”

“How can you know that?”

“I’m just... fairly confident.”

Gill said haltingly, “About... Carol. I—”

“I don’t care,” Agnes said.

“But—”

She raised a hand. “I don’t care. Your betrayal is... nothing, in the overall scheme of things.”

“I don’t understand,” Gill said.

Agnes shook her head ever so slightly. “Be strong for Marla. She’s going to need you. Whatever reservations I may have had about you, there haven’t been any where Marla is concerned. I know you love her very much. The next little while is going to be very difficult for her, but I’m hoping there will be some consolation. That she’ll get what she wanted. What was taken from her.”

“What are you talking about?”

Agnes turned and walked away.

“Who is this?” the 911 operator said.

“David Harwood. Detective Duckworth knows who I am.”

“I’m transferring you to a nonemergency line.”

“This is an—”

But then she was gone. Seconds later a man answered. “Hello?”

“Detective Duckworth?”

“Nope. This is Angus Carlson. You wanna leave a message?”

“Get him. Put him on the phone. Tell him it’s David Harwood.”

“I’m not sure where he is right now. I just got in. Hang on.” Several seconds went by, then: “He’s busy right now. What’s this about?”

“It’s about Marla Pickens. And Rosemary Gaynor. I know what happened.”

“Yeah, well, I’m guessing Detective Duckworth does, too,” Carlson said. “He’s with the Pickens woman right now in interrogation.”

“She’s been arrested?”

“Yup.”

“For the Gaynor thing?”

“No, jaywalking.”

“She didn’t do it. Marla’s innocent.”

“So, wait a second,” Carlson said. “Are you saying we’ve arrested the wrong person? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening before.”

“Have you ever heard of a cop being a total asshole?” I asked. “That’s happening right now.”

“Oh, sorry, you’re breaking up,” he said, as clearly as if he were in the car with me. “Try again later.”

Carlson ended the call.

“Dickhead,” I said, handing the phone back to Sarita.

“What happened?”

I shook my head, too angry to repeat it. “They’ve arrested Marla,” I said. “She’s being questioned now.” I paused to let it sink in. “She’ll go to jail, Sarita. She’ll go to jail if you don’t tell the police what you know, and what you did.”

“What if they think I did it?” she asked. “I had Ms. Gaynor’s blood on me.”

“No, they’re not going to be looking at you. They’re going to be looking at Dr. Sturgess and Mr. Gaynor. Sarita, in five more seconds, Sturgess would have killed me. He was going to stick me with that fucking needle. And then he would have done you. The safest thing for you to do is tell the cops everything you know.”

She bit her lower lip, stared out her window again. “Okay,” she said, not looking at me. “I will do it. I will help. I won’t try to run away.”

“Thank you.”

“I think... I think running and hiding would be even harder.” She turned, and I saw that she had been crying. “At least there is good news for Marla, yes? She must at least feel good to know her baby is alive.”

“She doesn’t know,” I said. “Not yet.”

“What?”

“You didn’t actually tell her, did you? When you handed Matthew to her?”

Sarita had to think. “I... I guess I didn’t. I guess I thought she would just know . I mean, all she would have to do is look into the face of that baby and she’d have to know it was hers.”